April 6, 2010

Sorry everyone - absenteeism in the extreme here over the last few months. Good reasons for it though - things have been hectic on the career side of things with all aspects hotting up pretty much together.

The  new start-up, CiviGuard, is going well. We had a momentous three weeks, starting with a DHS summit on modeling & simulation where we were able to share our thoughts with some of world’s great thought leaders on the subject. With the summit over, our next stop was CrisisCamp Silicon Valley (CCSV) which was a blast! It was great to see all the key participants in the crisis response and mapping space come together and share key insights and launch new initiatives. A highlight was running into Randi Zuckerberg, who heads up Facebook’s marketing division. There are some interesting synergies between Facebook and CiviGuard which we hope to leverage in the near future. It was our first CrisisCamp, and we expect to represent at many more in the future!

The final event last week was our biggest yet. Where 2.0 is probably one of the world’s premier conferences for location based services. We managed to get onto the roster for “Launchpad” which led us to share the stage with the hottest location start-up in the world right now - SimpleGeo. We went number two - after Will Carter’s ModZombies game which leverages FourSquare. I used his presentation as a segway into mine (something along the lines of “if zombies were to really attack, you’d like our software on-board”). It was an OK presentation - not my best. I could whine endlessly about how the clicker didn’t respond or that the slide-deck was the wrong one - bottom line was that I didn’t really prepare for these potentialities - my only goal should have been to deliver the message. Not going to let that happen again. You burn, you learn.

About an hour after the presentation, it was pretty clear that I was my own worst critic because people clearly understood the message and what we were trying to achieve in the emergency communication space. Which was awesome - we ended up snagging video interviews with GPS Business News, O’Reilly media and some press notes with SlashGeo. In a nutshell - one of my coolest experiences ever. I want to thank Brady Forrest for giving us the chance on that stage - we appreciate that.

Some more press will follow in the weeks ahead. Ahead of the show we launched our new site, a viral video, did a press release and got tons of traction through the Singularity University network. All in all - through social media, new media and internet properties - our total exposure was north of 100,000 impressions. Our Twitter follower count spiked by 30% and so did page views on our new site.

For most start-ups, Where 2.0 would be the absolute highlight of their year. We have the privilege of also participating at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington D.C. in May. This is a huge opportunity as we are keynoting in front of our primary customer base. We are super excited about this opportunity and look to make an even bigger impact then.

Next post is on the iPad. It won’t have any of the usual facts. Promise ;).

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